How Ethiopia's Adoption Industry Dupes Families and Bullies Activists

As the "searchers" who track down adopted children's histories increasingly uncover stories of fraud, corruption, and worse, these specialists are facing threats and even violence.

Two biological sisters, ages 4 and 6 and adopted in Ethiopia, listen to the singing of the national anthem during a U.S. naturalization ceremony / AP

In 2008, a
38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I'll call Kelly adopted an eight-year
old girl, "Mary," from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly,
following one from Guatemala. She'd sought out a child from Ethiopia in
the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems of adopting from
Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up their
babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers
procuring adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a
reputable agency in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never
should have been placed for adoption. She came to this determination
after hiring what's known as an adoption searcher.

Adoption
searchers -- specialized independent researchers working in a unique
field that few outside the community of adoptive parents even know
exists -- track down the birth families of children adopted from other
counties. In Ethiopia, searching has arisen in response to a dramatic
boom in international adoptions from the country in recent years. In
2010, Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international
adoptions to the U.S. The number of Ethiopian children adopted into
foreign families in the U.S., Canada, and Europe has risen from just a
few hundred several years ago to several thousand last year. The
increase has been so rapid -- and, for some, so lucrative -- that some
locals have said adoption was "becoming the new export industry for our country."

That
increase has also brought stories of corruption, child trafficking, and
fraud. Parents began to publicize the stories their adopted children
told them when they learned English: that they had parents and families
at home, who sometimes thought they were going to the U.S. to receive an
education and then return. Media investigations have found evidence that adoption agencies had recruited children from intact families. Ethiopia's government found
that some children's paperwork had been doctored to list children who
had been relinquished by living parents as orphans instead, which
allowed the agencies to avoid lengthy court vetting procedures.

"Her
entire paperwork, except for a couple of names, was completely
falsified," Kelly said. Mary's paperwork listed her as two years younger
than she was; it said she had one older sister when she in fact had two
younger sisters; and, most importantly, it said her mother had died
years ago. "One day I said to Mary, 'You know how your paperwork says
you were five and you're really seven?" Kelly recalled. "It also says
that your mom's dead.' And she goes, 'My mom's not dead.' She was
adamant that her mother wasn't dead, and in fact she wasn't. Her mom is
alive and it took our searcher just two days to find her."

Kelly,
through a friend who'd also adopted from Ethiopia, hired a searcher.
She sent copies of all her paperwork and waited for him to make the
nine-hour drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, to the northern region
from which Mary had been adopted.

The searcher determined Mary's real
birth date, that her birth family and mother were OK with the adoption,
and also collected some photos as well as information about Mary's
background. Kelly is planning to take Mary back to visit her family in
March.

"I wanted to verify that she hadn't been stolen. I
searched with the intention of sending her back to Ethiopia if I found
out she'd been stolen," said Kelly.

Kelly doesn't believe her
agency knowingly falsified the information. As with many cases of fraud
or corruption in Ethiopia's adoption program, it seems that the story
was changed at the local level, long before the adoption proceeded to
the country's federal courts and oversight agencies. Mary's grandfather,
who had often been her main caregiver, relinquished the child while her
mother was working elsewhere in Ethiopia; something that was only
possible because he and several witnessed claimed that the mother had
died.

"I can't imagine the weight that was on her," Kelly said
of Mary's recollection of her home in Ethiopia. "After I told her the
paperwork said her mom was dead, she thought maybe she was dead and
nobody told her. So it was huge for her to know she was right, that her
mother was alive. I was lucky she remembered and was strong enough to
stick with her story."

SEARCHING

This summer, I
accompanied a young Ethiopian searcher I'll call Samuel on a birth
family interview: a trek deep into the rural countryside of Ethiopia's
Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region (SNNPR), the
province of origin for many Ethiopian children adopted to the West, to
locate the family of a toddler-age girl adopted to Canada.

Starting
in the southern town of Sodo, we took a 12-mile drive through rural
roads that were so bad it took over an hour: first over deeply-potted
dirt throughways, cutting across expanses of grazing land, then off-road
until we arrived at a hamlet so small and remote it might have been
impossible to find without a guide. But even this village -- a handful
of houses and an HIV clinic -- was not our destination. We took a dirt
path through the backcountry, but our Land Ranger got stuck in deep
trenches of mud. A handful of local children emerged shyly from the
bordering fields and led us, on foot, the last half mile up to a
solitary mud-walled house surrounded by lush gardens and neatly fenced
in with stripped tree branches.

When we arrived, only a toddler
boy stood in the front yard, naked below the waist. But the spectacle of
several travelers carrying tripod and camera quickly drew nearly 30
neighboring children and adults, who watched solemnly while Samuel
framed shots of the exterior of the house. The birthmother Samuel sought
to interview, a widow in her early 40s with seven other children still
at home, was called from a neighbor's house to host her unexpected
guests. She smilingly obliged without question when Samuel and his
colleagues explained that they'd come to film for several hours at the
request of her daughter's new adoptive parents. Sitting in a chair in
the fields behind her house, her fingertips pressed together and her
eyes cast down, she answered dozens of questions about her background,
her remaining children, and the circumstances of her husband's death,
which had prompted the adoption.

Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

For several years, Samuel, a
soft-spoken filmmaker from Addis Ababa in his mid-20s, has traveled deep
into Ethiopia's countryside to locate the remaining parents, brothers,
sisters, and neighbors of Ethiopian children adopted to the U.S. and
Europe. For a moderate fee -- around $600, including travel and lodging
expenses for a two or three person crew -- he would create a DVD of
interviews with family members and a brief glimpse of the country the
child came from. He started doing this work for a prominent U.S.
adoption agency then later moved on to independent production, working
from a script of 60 to 70 questions he'd compile with the adoptive
family to ask of whatever closest relative or neighbor could be found.

But,
in the past several years, it's become increasingly difficult to find a
searcher in Ethiopia. Tasked with determining whether an adopted child
is a "manufactured orphan," searchers have faced intense intimidation in
Ethiopia as its adoption system boomed and then came under
international scrutiny. It took months to find adoptive families willing
to share the name or contact information for searchers they had used.
The first several times I emailed or called Samuel, he responded with
trepidation, confirming with me repeatedly that I was not associated
with any adoption agencies working in Ethiopia and that I wouldn't pass
on his name or information to any agencies.

Kathryn Joyce is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement and a book on adoption and religion forthcoming from PublicAffairs. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, The Nation, Slate, and other publications.